ANALYSIS: Undercounting of Covid-19 deaths is greatest in pro-Trump areas, study shows

Undercounting of Covid-19 deaths is greatest in pro-Trump areas - STAT Tens of thousands of Covid-19 deaths are going unreported, with far more missed in counties that strongly supported former President Trump. Olivia Goldhill STAT

Tens of thousands of Covid-19 deaths are going unreported in the U.S., with far more missed in counties that strongly supported former President Trump, according to new research.

The figures suggest that political leanings have helped suppress the true scale of deaths. In cases where the deceased didn’t have a Covid-19 test, a coroner or medical examiner has the freedom to interpret symptoms.

“There’s potentially latitude to make a judgement call conditional on a set of beliefs about Covid and whether it represents a serious problem or a hoax,” said Andrew Stokes, a professor of global health at Boston University School of Public Health who performed the analysis for STAT.

More than 413,000 people have died in the U.S. with Covid-19 attributed somewhere on their death certificate. The real death toll, as reflected in the number of excess deaths in 2020 compared with annual deaths from 2013 to 2018, is even higher. A separate study, led by Stokes, of 787 counties with more than 20 Covid-19 deaths from Feb. 1 to Oct. 17, 2020, found that while there were 199,124 official Covid-19 deaths in that time period, an additional excess 88,142 deaths weren’t attributed to the virus.

Some of these excess deaths are likely due to factors that were exacerbated by the pandemic, such as overdoses and suicide in response to isolation and economic hardship, or subpar health care in an overrun system. But researchers believe many are Covid-19 deaths that go uncounted. Overall, the true Covid-19 death toll is 44% higher than official figures, according to the study, which has been submitted to PLOS Medicine.

The researchers found that unattributed Covid-19 deaths were significantly higher in rural areas than urban; in the South compared to other regions; and in areas with lower levels of education. All these factors tend to correlate with support for Trump.

We see a lot of variation in excess deaths, and it’s kind of hard to explain,” said Katherine Hempstead, another researcher on the study and a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. There seems to be correlation between areas that were less inclined to take Covid-19 seriously and adopt preventive measures, such as mask-wearing and social distancing, and those with higher levels of unrecognized Covid-19 deaths, she said. ...